Word: lyricist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, comes from a glittering team: Director Trevor Nunn, Set Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who mounted Nicholas Nickleby, plus Composer Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Richard Stilgoe, who had joined the former trio to devise Cats. In reconceiving the show for Broadway, the creators had some smart ideas: instead of a gloomy, abandoned train siding, the gaudy set now represents a panorama of the U.S., dotted with highlights a child might recognize, from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge; the recorded narration too is now by a child...
...work so plot-heavy and meticulously told, Les Miserables began life as a score rather than a libretto, appeared as a record album before it reached the stage, and languished for five years between the French and British productions. The original creators, Composer Claude-Michel Schonberg and Lyricist Alain Boublil, owed little to French musical-theater tradition -- there isn't much of one -- and a lot to rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar. In their 1980 version at the 4,000-seat Palais des Sports in Paris, the show ran little more than half its present length and consisted...
WHAT GAVE the staged Little Shop its appeal was the purity of its homage to Cliche. Writer and lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken built their Little Shop out of an inestimable number of dramatic, social, cinematic and musical commonplaces. Superficially, it followed the plot of the Corman picture, but it also obeyed dramatic rules enforced through the millenia: the Ashman/Menken Little Shop was a carefully structured Greek tragedy, replete with chorus, hero, dilemma, tragic flaw, catastrophic misstep and ultimate retribution. Snappy Chiffons-type songs and bouffant hairdos notwithstanding, the resolution of Little Shop was closer to that...
...after repeatedly telling them it shouldn't matter. Curiously, Smile works. It is a swift-paced, skillfully performed and thoroughly professional entertainment that balances amusement at the shallow ambitions of the characters with respect for the depth of their feelings. Composer Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) and Author-Lyricist Howard Ashman (Little Shop of Horrors) have written touching songs for the stars, Anne Marie Bobby as a sweet, awkward A student who realizes she is out of her element at the pageant and Jodi Benson as a wanderer who is prematurely wise in the ways of selling herself, including...
...musical, its foremost contribution to the world theater, has typically been seen as a straightforward comic romance that sends audiences out grinning and humming. But in an intensely imaginative 13-show career, Stephen Sondheim has embraced all those unpromising themes. From his big-time debut in 1957 as the lyricist of West Side Story to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Sunday in the Park with George, a fantasy about the creation of a French impressionist painting, Sondheim, 56, has steadily pushed toward--or beyond--the limits of what the score, the narrative, the very premise of a musical...